Openings & Exhibitions March 2018

Peer Session 81 will discuss the work of artists Tracey Payne and Sylwia Narbutt at the Deptford X Event Space. Peer Sessions is a London-based crit group founded in 2009 by artists Kate Pickering and Charlotte Warne Thomas, as an educational support network for postgraduate artists, curators and academics. Doors open 6.30pm for 7pm start.

For his first London exhibition since the acclaimed ‘Disarm’ in 2013, Pedro Reyes returns with a fictional, pan-historical museum of sculpture, or a glyptotek, from the ancient Greek term for a cache of classic statuary. As well as a meditation on art history, these works explore both figurative and abstract approaches to sculpture, through materials including volcanic stone, marble, bronze and steel and through series such as The Protesters, of which the artist has stated: “Most statues commemorate an historical event, or the life of an influential person… Given the current political climate, I envisioned the anonymous protester as the incarnation of a contemporary hero, taking to the streets as an act of resistance.” Exhibition running until 21st April 2018.

‘The Valley of Lost Things’ (3rd March – 21st April 2018) tells the story of the losing and finding of a key. Through these events, three key versions existed; the original, the imagined, and the found key. It’s unclear how these three keys came into being and expired. It’s possible that they crossed paths and influenced each other’s existence. Through the losing, imagining and finding, something external became internalised, was reformed into something else, then regurgitated. Claire Davies tells this story through a set of new video works and sculptures that allow a consideration of memory as a cerebral substance, a weird protoplasm made of the internalised vision of an object and its physical existence.

For Totally Different Animals at Arcadia Missa, Gaby Sahhar and Rosie Grace Ward present new work about their lived experience of neo-liberal London, masked in a shiny coating of cyber-gothic fiction. Ward’s sculptural work imagines a dystopic future in which the violence and inequality of the capitalist present is viscerally manifested. Dominating the space, the insignia of an apocryphal corporation, RMT, drips with fake blood and unsubtle symbolism. Ward uses a code of slasher horror imagery to embody a world of 100000000000000 years of neoliberalism, a world built from a Reverse Midas Touch where everything has turned to shit. Exhibition running until 29th March 2018.

Gayle Chong Kwan’s The People’s Forest (3rd March – 20th May 2018) is an exhibition of new photographic and sculptural work exploring the history, politics, and people of London’s ancient woodland, Epping Forest. The exhibition is the culmination of Chong Kwan’s two-year engagement and research investigating the Forest as a liminal threshold between rural and urban, as a site of historic and recent protest, as a shared and contested resource, and the conflict between capital and common. Open Wednesday to Sunday, 10am – 5pm; free.

This spring, the Serpentine invites you to your first encounter with a sentient artwork named BOB (Bag Of Beliefs). A litter of BOBs will begin their lives in parallel on 6 March. Each BOB may become interested in you, love you, hate you, mistake you for someone else, learn from you, or ignore you. And you in turn may permanently influence a BOB’s behaviour, beliefs, and emotional life. BOB is the creation of American artist Ian Cheng and will sit at the heart of his first solo UK exhibition, transforming the Serpentine Gallery into a space not unlike an animal sanctuary for new forms of 21st century life. Growing and evolving at all hours of the day and night, BOBs will not be exhibited for your viewing pleasure – you will be exhibited to them. Exhibition running until 28th May 2018.

The first full public screening of anew film examining the relationship between gentrification, youth deaths, knife crime, incidents of police brutality, and how these impact on mental health, followed by an open conversation and Q+A.

A performance by Harriet Middleton-Baker with dancers from Green Candle Senior Dance Company. Part of Schema, a series of commissions responding to Cell Project Space’s exhibitions programme generously supported by Arts Council England.